In particular, he warns of 3 common errors: incorrect information, copy-and-paste, and poor note-taking. From his article:
Copy-and-paste is a necessary evil to save time during documentation of daily notes, but whatever is pasted must also be edited to reflect the current situation. Too often, the note makes reference to something that happened “yesterday.” For example, the sentence “Patient presented to ED with chest pain yesterday…” is pasted over the next two weeks in the daily progress note. An even more telling example is a sentence like “Patient’s admitting lab is normal…” being perpetuated while the actual creatinine levels rise every day.Every physician obliged to work with EMRs should read Dr. Klein's piece.
In one case, the judge commented about copy-and-paste issues: “I cannot trust any of the physician notes in which this occurred and the only conclusion I can reach is that there was no examination of the patient … it means to me that no true thought was given to the content that was going into ‘the note.’”
Checkboxes, particularly those that pre-populate, can be a physician’s nemesis. It’s easy to click on checkboxes, and often they are pre-checked in templates. EMRs have been presented in court that show, through checkboxes, daily breast exams on comatose patients in the ICU, detailed daily neurological exams done by cardiologists, and a complete review of systems done by multiple treating physicians on comatose patients. Questioning in court as to how long it takes to do a review of systems and a physical examination, the patient load of the physician for that day, and how many hours the physician was at work cast doubt on the truthfulness of the testifying physician. A time analysis showed that there was no way the physician could have accomplished all that was charted that day.
